The air in the room felt frozen and still when Sylvia opened her eyes. Awareness came slowly, like mist pushed away by the morning wind only here, there was no wind, no morning. Her gaze settled on the gray stone ceiling, the thin cracks in its surface the only decoration it offered.
She drew a long breath. No scent of wet earth, no birdsong, no rustle of leaves, only the faint metallic tang from the magic circle in the center of the room, still pulsing softly with blue light, like the heartbeat of some sleeping giant.
"…How long was I asleep?" she murmured, her voice rasping into the silence.
No one answered. In a dungeon, time was an illusion; without the sun, day and night were only guesses. For the permanent residents' monsters, traps, or the lingering fragments of trapped souls it might not matter at all.
